Authors: Stanislaw Lem
Here ended the recorded conversation. After a short silence they heard Steergard's next dialogue with the machine.
"You ran a simulation of the organizational structures?"
"Yes."
"For all their posited variants and conflicts?"
"Yes."
"What magnitude is the coefficient of variation of these structures for our game of communication? Give the interval of statistical weightedness, or a modal distribution, of the influence of the differences on our chances for contact."
"The coefficient equals one."
"For all simulations?"
"Yes."
"In other words, the organizational differences of the antagonists have no significance?"
"Correct. The technomilitary evolution, generated by constant conflict, becomes a variable that is independent of the type of organization, because this evolution is shaped by the structure of the conflict and not by the structure of the societies involved. To put it more precisely: it is in the early phases of the conflict that the organizational differences leave their imprint upon the tactics of psychological propaganda, diplomacy, sabotage, espionage, and the arms race. The division of budgets into military and nonmilitary is a function of the set of values that depend on organizational structure. But the growing push for supremacy in the conflict cancels out these differences in the set of values. It thereby makes the strategies of the adversaries similar.
"A mirror does not lie. You cannot incline it to reflect only postures that are free and relaxed without giving an image of everything else. Once the impracticability of disarmament is certain, the continuation of the race for dominance dispenses with those strategies of the adversaries dependent on their organizational differences. This dependence becomes like the influence of human muscle on the firing of a ballistic missile. In the Paleolithic, in the cavedwelling era, or even in the Middle Ages, a muscular opponent had an advantage over those who were weaker. But in the atomic age, a rocket could be launched by a child that pushed the right button. The Quintans no longer control the strategy that they have chosen. On the contrary, the strategy controls them. If it encountered organizational differences, it subordinated them to itself until they were made uniform. Had this not happened, the conflict would have ended with the victory of one of the sides. The activity of the war-sphere refutes this."
"Provide the optimal rules for the game of contact given such a diagnosis."
"The command centers of the planet know that it was the interception of our cavitators that caused the catastrophe. No one but them could have taken that action."
"Does this mean that the war-sphere is under their control in a radius that connects the orbit of the moon to Quinta?"
"Not necessarily. The limit of their operational range may not be a sphere having a surface that is sharply and cleanly demarcated from the alienated zone."
"Can you conclude anything about the personnel of the command centers?"
"I understand the allusion. The idea that certain members of the crew have been forwarding—that of non-biological command centers, or even of a dead globe with computers battling on after the demise of the Quintans—is absurd. Computers, even if deprived of the postulates of self-preservation, will act rationally. They adhere to minimax in their furthest prognostic calculations. They can give battle for as long as there exists a branch in which battle yields an advantage. But if the reward function in the endgame is total destruction, the minimax falls to zero. I reject the notion of mad computers. Besides, the spectral and
SG
data point to the presence of living beings."
"Good. Go on."
"There are calculating machines in the command centers, but there are also Quintans. The effects of the selenoclasm did not reach them: in a conflict of such duration and scale, nothing is protected better than headquarters. You know already that losses in the population present to the governments no compelling argument for the establishment of contact."
"Give me a compelling argument."
"Here is one. The time has come to call things by their names. Indirect pressure is insufficient. You must act directly, Captain."
"Threaten the command centers?"
"Yes."
"With a massive assault?"
"Yes."
"Curious. You consider the killing of intelligent beings who behave anti-intelligently to be the best method of establishing contact with them? Are we, then, to land on the planet like archeologists, to study the civilization that we have murdered?"
"No. You must threaten the planet itself with a sidereal blow. They have seen how their moon disintegrated."
"But surely that will be a bluff. If we renew our request for contact, we cannot annihilate our future partners in conversation. No great cunning is needed to see that. They will think that our threat is empty—and they will be right."
"The threat does not have to be completely empty."
"Strike the ring?"
"Captain, why do you conduct nocturnal discussions with a machine instead of going to bed, when you yourself know what must be done?"
The reproducer fell silent. Steergard placed another crystal in the slot.
"Bear with me," he said. "This is the last conversation."
The blue indicator light went on. Again they heard the monotonous voice of DEUS.
"Captain, I have some consolation for you. I examined the stability of the war-sphere and extrapolated into the future, to the limit of prognostic certainty. Regardless of the number of opponents and the diameter of the space of the battle attained, this civilization must perish. The simplest model is a house of cards. It cannot be arbitrarily high. Every such structure will eventually fall; that is evident even without calculation.'
"A house of cards? And more precisely?"
"The Holenbach Theory. In the growth of knowledge there are no irreplaceable people. Had there been no Planck, Fermi, Meitner, Einstein, or Bohr, the discoveries leading to the atomic bomb would have been made by others. The monopoly acquired by the Americans was short-lived and quickly countered. For decades the opponents, with nuclear missiles, kept one another at bay. They competed in the accuracy and payload of those missiles. Sidereal physics, however, does not offer the opportunity of such competition.
"A series of steps leads to the knowledge of nuclear reactions, critical mass, and the Bethe Cycle. Sidereal engineering, on the other haul is gained at one fell swoop. Prior to the discovery of the Holenbach interval one knows nothing, and afterward, everything. In the phase of the reversibility of armaments, when negotiations and peace are still possible, he who discovers the nuclear trump can use it as the highest suit but may not lead with it. In the phase of the cosmic war-sphere he who first discovers the sidereal effect will lead with it immediately because the space of games of combat, potentially symmetrical for conventional and atomic weapons, loses its stability upon the introduction of the sidereal factor. On a planet one cannot blackmail with sidereals.
"Nonexplosive thermonuclear reactions for a long time eluded control, with leaks of plasma and the unreliability of the fields that chained them. For several decades the difficulties seemed insurmountable. The difficulties of controlling gravitation are similar, but on the astronomical scale. One cannot begin small, first extracting from uranium ores isotope with the atomic weight of 235, then setting off a chain reaction, above critical mass, synthesizing plutonium, and thus obtaining a detonator for hydrogen-tritium bombs. The testing ground must be a celestial body.
"The sidereal phase is preceded by the phase of teratrons and anomalons. Therefore, I cannot understand the amazement of the physicists over what the
Gabriel
did. Had the Quintans captured and taken it apart, they would have been put on the track of Holenbach. The
Gabriel
was to have melted its teratron. As I recall, I proposed building in it a self-destruct charge."
"Why didn't you explain this to us?"
"I am not all-knowing. I operate with the data that you give me. Your physicists, Captain, considered the capture of the
Gabriel
an impossibility, as none of the objects of the war-sphere had shown even a tenth of the drive of the
Gabriel.
I had objections but no proof. The impossibility they pulled out of a hat. But it is difficult to say whether it was good or bad that my cousin in the
Gabriel
displayed such lightning resourcefulness. Had it allowed itself to be captured, there would be no talk now of contact, but of choosing between retreat and sidereal war with Quinta, who would be a player of the same strength as we. And if one factors out a sidereal strike by them at the
Hermes,
then we would be fleeing, full-speed, through the debris of a collapsing war-sphere, because the thing that would have shattered the sphere anyway in fifty or a hundred years would be precipitated. The bloc enlightened sidereally by the
Gabriel
would not wait for its enemy to catch up; it would strike preemptively."
"That is speculation."
"Certainly—but not speculation pulled out of a hat. My guess is that someone wanted the Moon for a proving ground, someone unaware that no plasmotron could supply the power needed to open the Holenbach interval. And whoever drove that party from the Moon did not have sufficient strength then to take possession of it. Someone gave check to the king, who was not of age. But the first party also gave check—to which piece, I do not know. The result was stalemate. On the Moon. Beyond the Moon, the game went on."
"Why didn't you present this in such a light before?"
"If you called my reasoning speculation just now, before the selenoclasm you would have said that DEUS was raving. Would you care to hear my version of Quinta's history?"
"Go ahead."
"The key to that history—to its turning point—is the ring. In the full acceleration of industrialization the planet supported many nations, with a powerful consortium of nations far in the forefront. They ventured into space; they harnessed the atom. At the same time there began a demographic explosion in the nations that were weaker industrially—stronger only in numbers. The consortium decided to increase the habitable surface by lowering the level of the oceans. The only way was to move the water into space, above the atmosphere. I do not know the technology employed for this. Water in hundreds of cubic miles can be transported neither by spaceship nor directly by a system of pumps and spouts. The first method demands unobtainable masses of fuel and an impossible number of carriers. The second cannot be realized, because before the streams projected upward—waterfalls in reverse—can attain escape velocity, they will evaporate from atmospheric friction and remain in the atmosphere.
"There are, however, many possible methods. I will give one. You could pierce the atmosphere with channels of lightning discharges and in the trail of each thunderbolt—arcing from the ocean shore to the thermosphere—shoot water vapor. I oversimplify. You could create in the atmosphere a kind of electromagnetic cannon—without a barrel, of course—which would be a tunnel of centrifugal impulses driving ionized water vapor. And give the water nonthermal, dipolar properties. On Earth a certain Rahman engaged in such hydroengineering. He showed that it was possible to drive water only to first escape velocity, whereby a ring of ice would begin to form around the planet, and that this ring would be unstable. Therefore, in the next step one had to accelerate the ring—once it formed in space—for it to become a centrifuge and fly apart, at second escape velocity. This, over a period of twenty to forty years. Otherwise, if there was weakened acceleration in space or a work stoppage, more water would return to the planet, due to friction with the upper gases of the atmosphere, than was thrown into space at the same time by the launchers. We need not go into greater detail. Suffice it to say that even from the
Eurydice
the gradual decay of the ring on the planet side was observed, as well as the spreading of the outer band.
"This could not have been beneficial to anyone on the planet. The returning water does more than produce cloudbursts; it creates a pluvial in the tropical belt, with maximum rainfall concentration varying according to the time of year, since the planet's rotational axis is inclined with respect to the ecliptic, much as Earth's. The average annual temperature has fallen two degrees Kelvin. The ice shield casts a shadow over part of the dayside of the planet and reflects the sunlight.
"A technical error, always possible, would have been corrected after a certain time. But there is no indication of repairs. Difficulties in planetary engineering, therefore, could not have been the reason for abandoning the enterprise. The reason must be sought elsewhere—in the political discord of the civilization. Of the initial conditions all we know is that they favored a project that could be carried out only by a global uniting of forces, a uniting that later came apart. The period of cooperation, at least in the area of technology, lasted about a hundred years. A deviation on the order of a decade or two is unimportant in this critical phase.
"What caused the departure from the road of cooperation? Local wars? Economic crises? Not likely. The course of political events, opaque to reconstructions and retrospects from its present state, can be studied only in a model called a Markov chain. This is a stochastic process that at each step effaces the path it takes. From what cosmic visitors to Earth of the twentieth century would observe, there would be no way for them—except by recourse to textbooks—to extrapolate back to the Crusades. So I fill this white blot with the following possibility: the growth of the different powers in the consortium was unequal. The seeds of antagonism were planted at the first forming of the partnership. The armed overthrow of the main force on the planet was impossible. The weaker nations participated in the global project, but their cooperation, genuine to begin with, became a pretense.
"The antagonism manifested itself—not directly, not by assault. There may have been more blocs, three or four, but for the ergodic minimum two would suffice—two opponents. An arms race began. It caused, first, the abandonment of the efforts to disperse the ice ring into space. The material and the energy allocated for that went instead into armament. At the same time, the breaking up of the ice ring in such a way that its debris would not cause harm to the inhabitants of all the continents ceased to pay for the superpower that had invested most in the project, since the positive results of such continued effort would benefit the enemy equally. The enemy reasoned and acted similarly. From then on, none of the sides touched the ring, though it came down in avalanches of ice on the planet. Pulled into the spiraling arms race, the sides had no remedy for that. Escalation sent the race out into cosmic space. Such could have been the prologue and first act. We arrived in the middle of the next act, and, unaware, dived headfirst into the multilayered war-sphere, with the innocent sun at the center."